Wednesday, April 27, 2005

Cosmic

Yesterday was a cosmic day. I say this is the "Bill & Ted" sense of the word: "Cosmic, dude!" The reason was from lack of sleep - everything seemed to be spinning around all over the place, and it was a psychedelic experience.

And I'm not exaggerating about the lack of sleep - I stayed up till about 6:15 AM yesterday (was that just yesterday??) working on the draft of my dissertation proposal. Got 2 hours of sleep. I ate breakfast and did one final read-through of the paper, which was a lucky thing because I realized that pages 13-14 were IDENTICAL to 1-2 because I had cut/pasted things from an abstract of this project I had written weeks ago. Nice. Thankfully I took a minute or two to take a look! I most of pages 1-2, and wrote another full page in its place in the introduction. It just came out of me, which was GOOD because what I wrote desperately needed to be there. I then threw on clothing and ran across town to class (I highly recommend shaving the night BEFORE you anticipate pulling an all-nighter: this was a good strategy this time around the clock). I was only 5 minutes late, and the professor/my advisor was 15 minutes late, so all went well.

Then I helped teach my last class that I'm assisting on, and after that I conducted one last pilot study interview. After coming home for dinner and helping to put Son into bed, I decided to take the night off. I watched House, but I fell asleep for the kicker part during the last 10 minutes...I was PISSED, but at least I was sleeping.

Oh, the proposal draft still needs plenty of work, but I suppose part of belonging to academia is opening oneself up for criticism. Hoo boy, though - plenty of holes in this piece all around into which criticism could collect! Oh well. For me it's "done" at least for a couple of days. Later this week and this weekend I hope to edit it so I can turn it over to a potential dissertation committee chair. We shall see. I get the sense that from here on out, the diss process is going to fly by.

That is, until this time next year when I no longer have passion for my topic and forget why the hell I started walking down this path in the first place.

Too long a post. If anyone actually reads this much, I thank you.

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